OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Syntactic Regions for Concurrent Programs
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2021
Year: 2021

In order to gain a better understanding of the state space of programs, with the aim of making their verification more tractable, models based on directed topological spaces have been introduced, allowing to take in account equivalence between execution traces, as well as translate features of the execution (such as the presence of deadlocks) into geometrical situations. In this context, many algorithms were introduced, based on a description of the geometrical models as regions consisting of unions of rectangles. We explain here that these constructions can actually be performed directly on the syntax of programs, thus resulting in representations which are more natural and easier to implement. In order to do so, we start from the observation that positions in a program can be described as partial explorations of the program. The operational semantics induces a partial order on positions, and regions can be defined as formal unions of intervals in the resulting poset. We then study the structure of such regions and show that, under reasonable conditions, they form a boolean algebra and admit a representation in normal form (which corresponds to covering a space by maximal intervals), thus supporting the constructions needed for the purpose of studying programs. All the operations involved here are given explicit algorithmic descriptions.
The complete weight enumerator of the Reed-Solomon code with dimension two or three
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

It is well-known that Reed-Solomon codes and extended Reed-Solomon codes are two special classes of MDS codes with wide applications in practice. The complete weight enumerators of these codes are very important for determining the capability of both error-detection and error-correction. In this paper, for any positive integer $m$ and prime $p$, basing on the character sums, we determine the complete weight enumerators of the Reed-Solomon code and the extended Reed-Solomon code with dimension $k$ $(k=2,3)$ over $\mathbb{F}_{p^m}$, explictly, which are generalizations of the corresponding results in \cite{BK91,K04}.
Extended Self-Critical Pipeline for Transforming Videos to Text (TRECVID-VTT Task 2021) -- Team: MMCUniAugsburg
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The Multimedia and Computer Vision Lab of the University of Augsburg participated in the VTT task only. We use the VATEX and TRECVID-VTT datasets for training our VTT models. We base our model on the Transformer approach for both of our submitted runs. For our second model, we adapt the X-Linear Attention Networks for Image Captioning which does not yield the desired bump in scores. For both models, we train on the complete VATEX dataset and 90% of the TRECVID-VTT dataset for pretraining while using the remaining 10% for validation. We finetune both models with self-critical sequence training, which boosts the validation performance significantly. Overall, we find that training a Video-to-Text system on traditional Image Captioning pipelines delivers very poor performance. When switching to a Transformer-based architecture our results greatly improve and the generated captions match better with the corresponding video.
A survey on product codes and 2-D codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

One of the simplest way of combining codes to form new codes is to take their direct product. Direct product of cyclic codes and various generalizations have been studied for many years. In this note, we survey cyclic product codes, direct product of various generalizations of cyclic codes and their properties.
Robotic Hand Rehabilitation System
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Rehabilitation exercises are essential to ensure speedy recovery of stroke patients. An automated system to assist the patient in performing a rehabilitation exercise repeatedly is designed. The design process is presented in this report.
TAGPerson: A Target-Aware Generation Pipeline for Person Re-identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Nowadays, real data in person re-identification (ReID) task is facing privacy issues, e.g., the banned dataset DukeMTMC-ReID. Thus it becomes much harder to collect real data for ReID task. Meanwhile, the labor cost of labeling ReID data is still very high and further hinders the development of the ReID research. Therefore, many methods turn to generate synthetic images for ReID algorithms as alternatives instead of real images. However, there is an inevitable domain gap between synthetic and real images. In previous methods, the generation process is based on virtual scenes, and their synthetic training data can not be changed according to different target real scenes automatically. To handle this problem, we propose a novel Target-Aware Generation pipeline to produce synthetic person images, called TAGPerson. Specifically, it involves a parameterized rendering method, where the parameters are controllable and can be adjusted according to target scenes. In TAGPerson, we extract information from target scenes and use them to control our parameterized rendering process to generate target-aware synthetic images, which would hold a smaller gap to the real images in the target domain. In our experiments, our target-aware synthetic images can achieve a much higher performance than the generalized synthetic images on MSMT17, i.e. 47.5% vs. 40.9% for rank-1 accuracy. We will release this toolkit\footnote{\noindent Code is available at \href{https://github.com/tagperson/tagperson-blender}{https://github.com/tagperson/tagperson-blender}} for the ReID community to generate synthetic images at any desired taste.
Beta-VAE Reproducibility: Challenges and Extensions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

$β$-VAE is a follow-up technique to variational autoencoders that proposes special weighting of the KL divergence term in the VAE loss to obtain disentangled representations. Unsupervised learning is known to be brittle even on toy datasets and a meaningful, mathematically precise definition of disentanglement remains difficult to find. Here we investigate the original $β$-VAE paper and add evidence to the results previously obtained indicating its lack of reproducibility. We also further expand the experimentation of the models and include further more complex datasets in the analysis. We also implement an FID scoring metric for the $β$-VAE model and conclude a qualitative analysis of the results obtained. We end with a brief discussion on possible future investigations that can be conducted to add more robustness to the claims.
Multimodal perception for dexterous manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Humans usually perceive the world in a multimodal way that vision, touch, sound are utilised to understand surroundings from various dimensions. These senses are combined together to achieve a synergistic effect where the learning is more effectively than using each sense separately. For robotics, vision and touch are two key senses for the dexterous manipulation. Vision usually gives us apparent features like shape, color, and the touch provides local information such as friction, texture, etc. Due to the complementary properties between visual and tactile senses, it is desirable for us to combine vision and touch for a synergistic perception and manipulation. Many researches have been investigated about multimodal perception such as cross-modal learning, 3D reconstruction, multimodal translation with vision and touch. Specifically, we propose a cross-modal sensory data generation framework for the translation between vision and touch, which is able to generate realistic pseudo data. By using this cross-modal translation method, it is desirable for us to make up inaccessible data, helping us to learn the object's properties from different views. Recently, the attention mechanism becomes a popular method either in visual perception or in tactile perception. We propose a spatio-temporal attention model for tactile texture recognition, which takes both spatial features and time dimension into consideration. Our proposed method not only pays attention to the salient features in each spatial feature, but also models the temporal correlation in the through the time. The obvious improvement proves the efficiency of our selective attention mechanism. The spatio-temporal attention method has potential in many applications such as grasping, recognition, and multimodal perception.
Mirror Matching: Document Matching Approach in Seed-driven Document Ranking for Medical Systematic Reviews
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

When medical researchers conduct a systematic review (SR), screening studies is the most time-consuming process: researchers read several thousands of medical literature and manually label them relevant or irrelevant. Screening prioritization (ie., document ranking) is an approach for assisting researchers by providing document rankings where relevant documents are ranked higher than irrelevant ones. Seed-driven document ranking (SDR) uses a known relevant document (ie., seed) as a query and generates such rankings. Previous work on SDR seeks ways to identify different term weights in a query document and utilizes them in a retrieval model to compute ranking scores. Alternatively, we formulate the SDR task as finding similar documents to a query document and produce rankings based on similarity scores. We propose a document matching measure named Mirror Matching, which calculates matching scores between medical abstract texts by incorporating common writing patterns, such as background, method, result, and conclusion in order. We conduct experiments on CLEF 2019 eHealth Task 2 TAR dataset, and the empirical results show this simple approach achieves the higher performance than traditional and neural retrieval models on Average Precision and Precision-focused metrics.
Multi-Head Deep Metric Learning Using Global and Local Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Deep Metric Learning (DML) models often require strong local and global representations, however, effective integration of local and global features in DML model training is a challenge. DML models are often trained with specific loss functions, including pairwise-based and proxy-based losses. The pairwise-based loss functions leverage rich semantic relations among data points, however, they often suffer from slow convergence during DML model training. On the other hand, the proxy-based loss functions often lead to significant speedups in convergence during training, while the rich relations among data points are often not fully explored by the proxy-based losses. In this paper, we propose a novel DML approach to address these challenges. The proposed DML approach makes use of a hybrid loss by integrating the pairwise-based and the proxy-based loss functions to leverage rich data-to-data relations as well as fast convergence. Furthermore, the proposed DML approach utilizes both global and local features to obtain rich representations in DML model training. Finally, we also use the second-order attention for feature enhancement to improve accurate and efficient retrieval. In our experiments, we extensively evaluated the proposed DML approach on four public benchmarks, and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieved state-of-the-art performance on all benchmarks.
Fake or Genuine? Contextualised Text Representation for Fake Review Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Online reviews have a significant influence on customers' purchasing decisions for any products or services. However, fake reviews can mislead both consumers and companies. Several models have been developed to detect fake reviews using machine learning approaches. Many of these models have some limitations resulting in low accuracy in distinguishing between fake and genuine reviews. These models focused only on linguistic features to detect fake reviews and failed to capture the semantic meaning of the reviews. To deal with this, this paper proposes a new ensemble model that employs transformer architecture to discover the hidden patterns in a sequence of fake reviews and detect them precisely. The proposed approach combines three transformer models to improve the robustness of fake and genuine behaviour profiling and modelling to detect fake reviews. The experimental results using semi-real benchmark datasets showed the superiority of the proposed model over state-of-the-art models.
Federated Learning for Cross-block Oil-water Layer Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Cross-block oil-water layer(OWL) identification is essential for petroleum development. Traditional methods are greatly affected by subjective factors due to depending mainly on the human experience. AI-based methods have promoted the development of OWL identification. However, because of the significant geological differences across blocks and the severe long-tailed distribution(class imbalanced), the identification effects of existing artificial intelligence(AI) models are limited. In this paper, we address this limitation by proposing a dynamic fusion-based federated learning(FL) for OWL identification. To overcome geological differences, we propose a dynamic weighted strategy to fuse models and train a general OWL identification model. In addition, an F1 score-based re-weighting scheme is designed and a novel loss function is derived theoretically to solve the data long-tailed problem. Further, a geological knowledge-based mask-attention mechanism is proposed to enhance model feature extraction. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to identify OWL using FL. We evaluate the proposed approach with an actual well logging dataset from the oil field and a public 3W dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly out-performs other AI methods.
Social Sensors in Epidemiological Networks via Graph Eigenvectors
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we consider epidemiological networks which are used for modeling the transmission of contagious diseases through a population. Specifically, we study the so-called social sensors problem: given an epidemiological network, can we find a small set of nodes such that by monitoring disease transmission on these nodes, we can get ahead of the overall epidemic in the full population? In spite of its societal relevance, there has not been much statistical work on this problem, and we aim to provide an exposition that will hopefully stimulate interest in the research community. Furthermore, by leveraging classical results in spectral graph theory, we propose a novel method for finding social sensors, which achieves substantial improvement over existing methods in both synthetic and real-world epidemiological networks.
Efficient Belief Space Planning in High-Dimensional State Spaces using PIVOT: Predictive Incremental Variable Ordering Tactic
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

In this work, we examine the problem of online decision making under uncertainty, which we formulate as planning in the belief space. Maintaining beliefs (i.e., distributions) over high-dimensional states (e.g., entire trajectories) was not only shown to significantly improve accuracy, but also allows planning with information-theoretic objectives, as required for the tasks of active SLAM and information gathering. Nonetheless, planning under this "smoothing" paradigm holds a high computational complexity, which makes it challenging for online solution. Thus, we suggest the following idea: before planning, perform a standalone state variable reordering procedure on the initial belief, and "push forwards" all the predicted loop closing variables. Since the initial variable order determines which subset of them would be affected by incoming updates, such reordering allows us to minimize the total number of affected variables, and reduce the computational complexity of candidate evaluation during planning. We call this approach PIVOT: Predictive Incremental Variable Ordering Tactic. Applying this tactic can also improve the state inference efficiency; if we maintain the PIVOT order after the planning session, then we should similarly reduce the cost of loop closures, when they actually occur. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we applied PIVOT in a realistic active SLAM simulation, where we managed to significantly reduce the computation time of both the planning and inference sessions. The approach is applicable to general distributions, and induces no loss in accuracy.
Universal Transformer Hawkes Process with Adaptive Recursive Iteration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Asynchronous events sequences are widely distributed in the natural world and human activities, such as earthquakes records, users activities in social media and so on. How to distill the information from these seemingly disorganized data is a persistent topic that researchers focus on. The one of the most useful model is the point process model, and on the basis, the researchers obtain many noticeable results. Moreover, in recent years, point process models on the foundation of neural networks, especially recurrent neural networks (RNN) are proposed and compare with the traditional models, their performance are greatly improved. Enlighten by transformer model, which can learning sequence data efficiently without recurrent and convolutional structure, transformer Hawkes process is come out, and achieves state-of-the-art performance. However, there is some research proving that the re-introduction of recursive calculations in transformer can further improve transformers performance. Thus, we come out with a new kind of transformer Hawkes process model, universal transformer Hawkes process (UTHP), which contains both recursive mechanism and self-attention mechanism, and to improve the local perception ability of the model, we also introduce convolutional neural network (CNN) in the position-wise-feed-forward part. We conduct experiments on several datasets to validate the effectiveness of UTHP and explore the changes after the introduction of the recursive mechanism. These experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that the performance of our proposed new model has a certain improvement compared with the previous state-of-the-art models.
Two-phase training mitigates class imbalance for camera trap image classification with CNNs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

By leveraging deep learning to automatically classify camera trap images, ecologists can monitor biodiversity conservation efforts and the effects of climate change on ecosystems more efficiently. Due to the imbalanced class-distribution of camera trap datasets, current models are biased towards the majority classes. As a result, they obtain good performance for a few majority classes but poor performance for many minority classes. We used two-phase training to increase the performance for these minority classes. We trained, next to a baseline model, four models that implemented a different versions of two-phase training on a subset of the highly imbalanced Snapshot Serengeti dataset. Our results suggest that two-phase training can improve performance for many minority classes, with limited loss in performance for the other classes. We find that two-phase training based on majority undersampling increases class-specific F1-scores up to 3.0%. We also find that two-phase training outperforms using only oversampling or undersampling by 6.1% in F1-score on average. Finally, we find that a combination of over- and undersampling leads to a better performance than using them individually.
Time Series Data Mining Algorithms Towards Scalable and Real-Time Behavior Monitoring
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years, there have been unprecedented technological advances in sensor technology, and sensors have become more affordable than ever. Thus, sensor-driven data collection is increasingly becoming an attractive and practical option for researchers around the globe. Such data is typically extracted in the form of time series data, which can be investigated with data mining techniques to summarize behaviors of a range of subjects including humans and animals. While enabling cheap and mass collection of data, continuous sensor data recording results in datasets which are big in size and volume, which are challenging to process and analyze with traditional techniques in a timely manner. Such collected sensor data is typically extracted in the form of time series data. There are two main approaches in the literature, namely, shape-based classification and feature-based classification. Shape-based classification determines the best class according to a distance measure. Feature-based classification, on the other hand, measures properties of the time series and finds the best class according to the set of features defined for the time series. In this dissertation, we demonstrate that neither of the two techniques will dominate for some problems, but that some combination of both might be the best. In other words, on a single problem, it might be possible that one of the techniques is better for one subset of the behaviors, and the other technique is better for another subset of behaviors. We introduce a hybrid algorithm to classify behaviors, using both shape and feature measures, in weakly labeled time series data collected from sensors to quantify specific behaviors performed by the subject. We demonstrate that our algorithm can robustly classify real, noisy, and complex datasets, based on a combination of shape and features, and tested our proposed algorithm on real-world datasets.
Gendered Differences in Face Recognition Accuracy Explained by Hairstyles, Makeup, and Facial Morphology
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Media reports have accused face recognition of being ''biased'', ''sexist'' and ''racist''. There is consensus in the research literature that face recognition accuracy is lower for females, who often have both a higher false match rate and a higher false non-match rate. However, there is little published research aimed at identifying the cause of lower accuracy for females. For instance, the 2019 Face Recognition Vendor Test that documents lower female accuracy across a broad range of algorithms and datasets also lists ''Analyze cause and effect'' under the heading ''What we did not do''. We present the first experimental analysis to identify major causes of lower face recognition accuracy for females on datasets where previous research has observed this result. Controlling for equal amount of visible face in the test images mitigates the apparent higher false non-match rate for females. Additional analysis shows that makeup-balanced datasets further improves females to achieve lower false non-match rates. Finally, a clustering experiment suggests that images of two different females are inherently more similar than of two different males, potentially accounting for a difference in false match rates.
Lane Change Decision-Making through Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Due to the complexity and volatility of the traffic environment, decision-making in autonomous driving is a significantly hard problem. In this project, we use a Deep Q-Network, along with rule-based constraints to make lane-changing decision. A safe and efficient lane change behavior may be obtained by combining high-level lateral decision-making with low-level rule-based trajectory monitoring. The agent is anticipated to perform appropriate lane-change maneuvers in a real-world-like udacity simulator after training it for a total of 100 episodes. The results shows that the rule-based DQN performs better than the DQN method. The rule-based DQN achieves a safety rate of 0.8 and average speed of 47 MPH